Chile Forum

Chile Forum in English for Gringos, Expatriates, and Travelers to Exchange Ideas and Information about Chile, South America. For more than a decade, the Chile Forum has been the center for expats to share their collective knowledge and experience about living in Chile. The Chile Forum is a free community service brought to you by the law office of Spencer Global.

Hi all,
I recently signed up after being a reader of this forum for some time. A lot of interesting reading material to find here ...but also a bit overwhelming
Anyway I am a 48 year old Dutch guy with a Chilean girlfriend and together we're "trying" to raise our currently 5 year old boy (Dutch and Chilean nationality) and are living in the Netherlands.
Long story short: after a 6 month stay in Chile/Santiago back in 2015 to learn Spanish and see if we could start a living there the conclusion then was that Chile is too expensive compared to the Netherlands, mainly because of housing, needing to send our son to a private school for proper schooling and it wouldn't help that being able to speak fluently Spanish (Chilean version) seems to be a must, we kind of stopped looking further. However due to family/private issues my girlfriend really wants to return to Santiago, so I am looking into it again and this time more thoroughly so I'll be digging in this forum more frequent I guess

I wouls suggest you stay in the Netherlands. I lived there with my wife for a few years back in tne 80’s and alhough I know the welfare state is not as generous now, believe me, you have far more advantages living there than in Chile. For a start, things actually work how they should there, people respect others, and the educational opportunties are better. I suggest you ask yourself what benefits would be achieved by moving to Chile. Family issues usually dont last forever, and you should foremostly consider your own family before others. Chile continues to be an expensive place to live in , if you want to live to European standards. As you found before, housing and schooling are good examples, and there’s no way you’d want to send your child to a government school here.

Hi all,
I recently signed up after being a reader of this forum for some time. A lot of interesting reading material to find here ...but also a bit overwhelming
Anyway I am a 48 year old Dutch guy with a Chilean girlfriend and together we're "trying" to raise our currently 5 year old boy (Dutch and Chilean nationality) and are living in the Netherlands.
Long story short: after a 6 month stay in Chile/Santiago back in 2015 to learn Spanish and see if we could start a living there the conclusion then was that Chile is too expensive compared to the Netherlands, mainly because of housing, needing to send our son to a private school for proper schooling and it wouldn't help that being able to speak fluently Spanish (Chilean version) seems to be a must, we kind of stopped looking further. However due to family/private issues my girlfriend really wants to return to Santiago, so I am looking into it again and this time more thoroughly so I'll be digging in this forum more frequent I guess

Serious? The Netherlands is cheaper than Chile? How can that be? I've spent time in Amsterdam and the cost of living was crazy high. My family of 4 lives quite well on a fraction of our budget from living in the US. I dont mean to beat a dead horse, but can you layout the nuts and bolts of how you cone to the conclusion that Holland is cheaper than Chile by any significant margin?

Not sure what was going on in the 80s there, but when we were there as grad students it was crazy expensive.

We got dozens of dutch clients and there families living all over chile (mostly in the south). All doing very well, and in fact the dutch seem to settle in to chile better than most. Many of our oldest clients are dutch.

You can't see Amsterdam prices as costs of the whole Netherlands. Amsterdam is indeed very expensive. We live "cheaply" because we live in a village and bought a not to special house at the right time and so my mortgage is just around 222.000 CLP/month. Food is more expensive and so must be the tax rate. I don't have a view on all the living costs in Chile, but so far Chile only seems to be cheaper on food, clothing, tax, transportation and most important : salaries.
I rough calculation (that's why I am digging in more in details for total costs in Chile) gives me a 1.500.000 CLP/months of expenses. In one of the topics about moving to Chile someone even noted to need a 4.000 USD/month to start, but not sure about the whole context anymore and can't find it at the moment. A decent income seems to be around the same 1.500.000 CLP, so no money left every month...Our total costs of living in the Netherlands are roughly half of it and due to a much higher income here (to pay tax ) we have money to spend extra over here. That includes flying to Chile on a regularly base.
I don't know what I would be able to earn in Chile (network engineer in the IT business), but so far I read about that for foreigners (especially the ones that don't speak Spanish fluently yet) it seems quit difficult to get a decent one, so my best option might even be trying to do remote working (the advantage of working in IT I hope).
Sure living in a village is not comparable to living in the city, but since the Netherlands is so small, it doesn't matter if you live in a village. All is close by anyway My average drive to my current job takes around 30 minutes by car and have to go to a city.
Living outside Santiago doesn't seem to be an option if I read about the time/travel needed to get in/out the city and the family of my girlfriend lives in the city....

I wouls suggest you stay in the Netherlands. I lived there with my wife for a few years back in tne 80’s and alhough I know the welfare state is not as generous now, believe me, you have far more advantages living there than in Chile. For a start, things actually work how they should there, people respect others, and the educational opportunties are better. I suggest you ask yourself what benefits would be achieved by moving to Chile. Family issues usually dont last forever, and you should foremostly consider your own family before others. Chile continues to be an expensive place to live in , if you want to live to European standards. As you found before, housing and schooling are good examples, and there’s no way you’d want to send your child to a government school here.

Staying in the Netherlands is easier to say than to do to be honest. There are a lot of reasons to think of staying, but the most important reasons to go to Chile would be her family. Since I don't have such a strong relation with the family I got left as she has, my ties with the Netherlands are actually not so big. I do like my country and some places I even love (like being on one of our "wadden" Islands, where we have a "stacaravan" ), but I also like Chile and love the southern part of it. In short the benefit of moving to Chile would be that my girlfriend is back close to her family. Family issues don't last forever indeed, but so do relations. Nothing beats being homesick so bad I guess. My parents lived in Aruba for several years (I wasn't born yet), but because my mother got very homesick (also missed her family) they finely returned to the Netherlands.

I don't think living to European standards should be the goal in my live and I am sure a lot of Chileans are happy people as well not living according to those standards. They're perfectly happy with their own. At least I hope

Well guess it depends on what you are doing. Obviously santiago is expensive.

In the neatherlands, day to day living expenses i thought were expensive, but my wife and i were in grad school at the university of amsterdam. Our masters programs cost us around $20,000 u.s. for both of us; an equvelent ranked program would have costs us an easy $100,000 u.s. each in the states, if not more. A lot more. Probably closer to 200,000 each.

If you have kids in the neatherlands it is cheaper. When i was there the goverment was paying people to have kids, besides all the investment in things like schools, daycare, etc.

What we see is a lot of dutch moving to chile that have money, simply because they dont have to pay the high taxes to the neatherlands. For tax advantage, probly cheaper to live in chile.

I don't know what I would be able to earn in Chile (network engineer in the IT business), but so far I read about that for foreigners (especially the ones that don't speak Spanish fluently yet) it seems quit difficult to get a decent one, so my best option might even be trying to do remote working (the advantage of working in IT I hope).

There was a recent thread about Amazon deploying AWS here where we discussed how hard it is to find a decent network engineer or DevOps in Chile. Maybe you can use this shortage in IT to your advantage.

Living outside Santiago doesn't seem to be an option if I read about the time/travel needed to get in/out the city and the family of my girlfriend lives in the city....

If you are concerned about housing costs and can be somewhat mobile due to working in IT (and don't need to see the gf's family every single day), have you considered looking at somewhere just outside of Santiago?

Places in the Valparaiso Region or Rancagua (O'Higgins Region) can be 60-90 minutes away from Santiago, yet housing could be anywhere from 10% to 40% cheaper (depending on what you're comparing).......and Rancagua even has a train connection to Santiago in case regular driving isn't an attractive idea.

As I understand it, we even have a regular forum member here who is British and lives in a rural part of the RM (same region as Santiago)......an option like that is probably under 45 minutes away from the city itself by car.

One person's opinion (and I'm trying to say this in a friendly way) --
I would have to recommend that you re-examine your preconceptions from first principles with the conscious intent to change and adapt them to the realities of your goals. That is to say, if the need to learn Spanish was a deal breaker before, then you will certainly find many more unknown deal breakers all along the way. The only way to a successful transition is to commit to overcoming each (perceived) obstacle, even the unknown ones. Take heart in the successful experience of others who have made the transition before you.

My advice would be not to burn your bridges in the Netherlands if you do come. Don't sell your house, rent it. Come with a view to spending 3-6 months here, Then see how things look on the ground. Price health care. Price housing once you understand the neighbourhoods. You can buy a LOT of plane tickets for your gf for what settling in would cost.